Abby Abernathy is a good girl. She doesn’t drink or swear, and she has the appropriate number of cardigans in her wardrobe. Abby believes she has enough distance from the darkness of her past, but when she arrives at college with her best friend, her path to a new beginning is quickly challenged by Eastern University’s Walking One-Night Stand.

Travis Maddox, lean, cut, and covered in tattoos, is exactly what Abby wants—and needs—to avoid. He spends his nights winning money in a floating fight ring, and his days as the ultimate college campus charmer. Intrigued by Abby’s resistance to his appeal, Travis tricks her into his daily life with a simple bet. If he loses, he must remain abstinent for a month. If Abby loses, she must live in Travis’s apartment for the same amount of time. Either way, Travis has no idea that he has met his match.

Beautiful Disaster (Beautiful #1) by Jamie McGuire.

Well it’s taken me a few hours to work through my feelings for this book. It was amazingly written which is why I have it the 5 stars over 4. I really enjoyed it, and I couldn’t put it down (I was reading until 3am before I even realised what the time was), but there’s something niggling in the back of my mind wondering about why I enjoyed it so much.

I love flawed characters and Abby and Travis are that in a nutshell. I loved the change in Travis when he realised that actually he was capable of loving someone, and that if he didn’t win Abby over then he would never be happy. Reading it from Abby’s point of view, I loved to feel her confusion and hesitation when it came to Travis, but what I think was bothering me the most when I read it was that I knew that it would have been better for both of them if they had never met, yet still I wanted them to work it out. That is what made this book such a compelling and emotional read, as it really makes you conflicted, just as the characters are too.

Before I read this book I saw some reviews talking about how violent Travis was which made me cautious when I started reading, as I will never condone violence to women in a relationship no matter how upset someone is. But those reviews are completely misleading, yes Travis is violent, but even with that aggressive nature and his ability to be violent to those around him, he has he would never be violent towards Abby, and if he ever was, I couldn’t imagine he’d be able to live with himself afterwards.

What I wold have liked to see was some explanation for why Travis was the way he is. His mother died when Travis was very young, and of course that would have a huge impact on him as he grew up with a dysfunctional family unit, but I felt there should have been more of a reason for why he was so deeply emotionally damaged. Of course this may be explained more fully in the second book written from Travis’ points of view ‘Walking Disaster’.

So overall this was an emotional roller coaster of a read, I immensely enjoyed it, but the fact that I was so conflicted with how their relationship progressed and the pain that they both were in when they were together and apart made the book so much more to me than just another book on the ‘read’ bookshelf, it had engaged me emotionally and made me really think about how life can be. That is what made the book so great, and I’ll definitely be checking out more of this author’s works. Sadly the only thing that I didn’t connect to was the descriptions of Travis’ appearance. I couldn’t connect to the character as a shaved head for some strange reason and had to imagine him with unruly dark hair before I felt his character come alive to me. Just because, being a student myself, I know that the guys the girls tend to fawn over, much like the girls in this book, tend to have a mop of hair. But that’s just me 🙂